Improving cohesiveness and flexibility in systems management architectures using distributed object technologies over the internet

Management applications are sensitive to changes in application and system configuration. This coupling makes it difficult and expensive to develop management applications and keep them up-to-date with respect to the systems they manage. In this paper we propose the use of platform-independent objects to help decrease this coupling and increase the cohesion in management architectures. With our approach developers of managed applications create platform-independent mediator objects that provide a uniform interface to be used by management applications. The mediators are responsible for location, access, and representation transparencies for application attributes. The mediator objects are forwarded by user applications to the management applications which invoke their methods to perform management functions. The proposed approach permits the development of generic management applications where the application dependent features of managed applications and hosts are brought into the management applications at execution time. We describe install, display, control, and predictive model building as examples of management applications and describe how they are supported using this approach.